Experiential approaches to sanitation-goal assessment: Sanitation practices in selected informal settlements in Cape Town, South Africa

ABSTRACT Since 1977, the World Health Organisation has published global sanitation goals, targets and plans of action, all using numbers and ratios to assess success. Governments have done similarly. Such assessments ignore how informal settlement residents use and manage toilets and how sanitation practices reveal shortcomings in local authorities’ attempts to assess success in meeting sanitation-provision challenges. Using ethnographic data gathered between 2013 and 2014 in four Cape Town informal settlements, the article describes residents’ on-the-ground sanitation practices. It shows how those practices have limited or precluded some people’s access to facilities ostensibly provided for all; how socio-political factors lead to sanitation practices that thwart public health goals; and how such practices reflect popular aspirations to citizenship whilst undermining local authorities’ systems. Challenging numbers-based claims about the extent of sanitation access, the article suggests a need for ethnographic and functional experiential-behavioural modes of assessment.


Introduction
South Africa has vast numbers of urban informal settlements, all with inadequate sanitation provision.Residents of these settlements (elsewhere called slums or shantytowns) consequently discard human waste, thereby engaging in sanitation practices, in widely diverse ways.Those include, among others, excreting into public-access full-flush sewered toilets alongside their settlement, into container and chemical toilets (despised as apartheid-era bucket toilets in disguise [Robins 2014, 3]), into similarly despised portable flush (camping) toilets (known locally as porta-potties and at one point provided by municipalities to households in some informal settlements), and into privately owned domestic buckets that residents keep in their shack homes and then empty either into public flush toilets or nearby container toilets -or sometimes simply onto nearby wetlands or other open spaces.Sometimes people also resort to excreting into used plastic shopping bags, which they then hurl across their residence boundaries into a nearby alley corner, onto solid waste collection points in their neighbourhoods or elsewhere out of immediate sight -a mode of faecal disposal, which settlement residents call 'flying toilets'.Where container and chemical toilets and porta-potties have been provided by a local municipality, the municipalities concerned have established contracts with service providers to clear the human waste deposited by residents in those receptacles and to remove it to sewerage treatment works, and to clean the receptacles for residents' further use (Taing 2015;Pan 2016:C-3;Muanda, Goldin, and Haldenwang 2020).
Whilst in no way suggesting that any of it is normative or desirable, the above brief description highlights the diverse ways people attempt to manage disposal of their human waste (that is, engage in sanitation practices) in often very difficult circumstances, and the variety of human-waste disposal technologies municipalities provide for them.Various studies in and around Cape Town have revealed that most informal settlement residents want a full-flush sewered toilet in each house -that is, a family-controlled flush toilet plumbed into a reliable water supply and a conventional sewer draining ultimately into a sewerage treatment works (see also Eales 2011a, 73;2011b, 46;Penner 2010 who describes this same demand for the city of eThekwini [Durban]; SAHRC 2010, 2n6).Equally, clear from those various studies is that many diverse factors have precluded achievement of that ideal.Those factors include, among others (see Eales 2011b;Taing 2015, 6), matters of land ownership and related constraints on expenditure of public funds on fixed infrastructure; concerns about residents' settlement tenure, as well as challenges regarding informal housing densities and layouts and inadequate financial and technical capacity.The latter include inadequate skills for managing ever larger scale waste water treatment systems (Eales 2011a(Eales , 74, 2011b, 50), 50).Extensive municipal-level corruption has also been a major constraint (Eales 2011b, 53).
As indicated, municipalities have, where technically, financially and administratively possible, provided sewered full-flush toilets.But these are generally constructed in long rows along a settlement's edge in spaces where sewer lines can be laid in government owned land.In recent years in Cape Town, those have been serviced during daylight hours by municipally paid janitors providing everyday maintenance.Elsewhere in Cape Town, sanitation provision has taken the form of container or chemical toilets and/or camping toilets (porta-potties) with a supposedly regular replacement and cleansing service -ostensibly in order to meet a specified statistical goal of toilet facility provision rate per numbers of households in any specific informal settlement (Pan 2016, 4-42).
Yet, under duress, residents resort also to excreting into buckets they have in their shacks, to flying toilets and to open defecation.Some have told researchers that they prefer, when they can manage, to 'hold' until they reach places where they can relieve themselves in a conventional flush toilet -sometimes at their workplaces or in shopping mall facilities, other times in neighbouring formal residential areas where they request residents to allow them to use their toilets.
What circumstances lead people to resort to these diverse and unhygienic sanitation practices?More importantly, at least for this article, what can be learned from ethnographies that describe such diverse and unhygienic sanitation behaviours?At a more abstract or meta level, what does that reveal about the (in)adequacy of attempting to use crude numbers-based data to assess the extent to which local, national and indeed global sanitation development goals have or have not been achieved?
The phenomenon of urban informal settlements and their rapid growth, both in size and number, is widespread across cities of the so-called developing, emerging or third worldareas recently described as the global south.Infrastructure development has not kept pace with the very rapid population growth characterising these cities.Goals, both global and national, to address that lack of infrastructure development have been published.But as shown below, particularly as regards sanitation provision, those goals, often not met, are themselves misplaced.That is because they assume that simply counting numbers of provided toilets generates sufficient evidence of achievement (or not) of the goals.As Pan, Armitage and van Ryneveld (2018, 432) have pointed out regarding South Africa's records, 'national census statistics on sanitation d [o] not include the condition of the sanitation facility' -a point illustrated below regarding unusable and inaccessible edge-ofinformal-settlement toilets.Moreover, showing the diverse social behaviour relating to human-waste disposal (sanitation) technologies enables one to recognise how numbers-based assessments fail to recognise the extent to which sanitation goals are commonly missed, even when the numbers suggest they have been met.
The article also points to the inappropriateness of local governments using numbers and ratios to determine what sanitation services and facilities are needed in informal settlements.It does that by indicating that residents' sanitation behaviours are never congruent with technocrats' expectations regarding people's use patterns of the toilets local authorities provide; and that often results in the technocrats' intended outcome not being achieved -at least from the perspective of users for whom the functionality of what has been provided is paramount, rather than just the presence of technology in numbers assumed to be adequate by technocratic standards and that are sometimes used to assert adequacy, especially immediately prior to elections (Templehoff 2012).(WHO 1993, 1), avowed that 'an adequate supply of safe water and basic sanitation' is basic to primary health care and that governments needed to create policy, strategies and plans of action to achieve and sustain that goal.

Global sanitation-provision goals: a summary history of numbers-based goals
These statements of intent constituted the first ever published attempts to develop something akin to global guidelines for water and sanitation provision.But they lacked substantive content about what constitutes basic sanitation.The Mar del Plata Action Plan called on UN member states and regional commissions to create appropriate committees to assess the problem's extent in the hope that, by thirteen years later (i.e.1990), 'safe drinking water and sanitation [would be provided] for all human settlements' (UN 1977, 63).The Declaration of Alma Ata's stated goal was that 'All governments should formulate national policies, strategies and plans of action to launch and sustain primary health care as part of a comprehensive national health system'.In retrospect, both were misplaced since their goals proved unachievable, some countries' efforts notwithstanding.Similarly misguided was building an equally unachievable goal into the 1981-1990International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade (O'Rourke 1992).
The goals were misplaced because, as O'Rourke (1992,1930) points out, setting unachievable targets may lead to disillusion.Moreover, they failed to address the inter-related phenomena of very rapid urbanisation and inadequate urban-planning and infrastructure-development capacity and resources in developing country contexts.Unsurprisingly, therefore, a decade had passed after the 1977 Mar del Plata Action Plan's 1990 deadline had been missed before another such global goal was published, in 2000.It constituted part of the UN's Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).MDG target 7c sought to 'halve by 2015 the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation' (UN n.d.a.) -but without clarifying what the assessment baseline was.And it left unaddressed the needs of the remaining half of the population without such access.
MDG7c's water-provision facet was reportedly achieved by 2010 and exceeded by 2015 (UNICEF & WHO 2015, 4).Yet the 2015 sanitation goal was 'missed by almost 700 million people' (op cit p.5).That was despite 2.1 billion people (77% of the world's then population) having reportedly 'gained access [by 2015] to an improved sanitation facility since 1990' although 12% of them (252 million) reportedly had access only via shared facilities (op cit p.5; fig.4). 1 Despite that progress, 2.4 billion people were reportedly still, in 2015, using unimproved sanitation facilities, including 946 million confined to open defecation (p.16).
In light of those circumstances, in 2015 Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6.2 set another such (probably unachievable) target: 'By 2030, achieve access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all and end open defecation' (UN n.d.b.) (UN 2021, 13).
The above review of global organisations' attempts to address inadequacy in sanitation provision (summarised in Table 1) indicates that, since the MDGs' publication, the principle focus has been on apparently crudely calculated numbers (rather than on people's experiences) -a focus which is itself, as O'Rourke (1992) implied long ago, probably a product of political negotiation and clumsy diplomacy in processes aiming only to ensure that all nation-states appear committed to progressive change without having ultimately to have to account for failure.Remarkably absent is consideration of means to assess people's experiences of the functionality, for them, of provided sanitation.

South African national and local government sanitation policy
South Africa's apartheid policies prevented most citizens from living or settling in most urban areas.Consequently, the immediate post-apartheid era (and the period immediately preceding the apartheid government's 1990 capitulation) saw very rapid urban-ward migration that still persists (Todes 2021).A result was the growth of urban informal settlements.The immediate post-1994 governing party's Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) noted that 'only one person in seven has access to adequate sanitation' (RDP 1994 Clause 2.6.1) and it indicated an intention 'to provide clean water and sanitation to all' (Clause 1.4.2).This was in a context where about 56% of the country's population 'did not have access to adequate sanitation' (van Koppen, Schreiner, and Fakir 2011, 2) The RDP thus set a goal of providing 'an adequate/safe sanitation facility per [residential] site' (Clause 2.6.6).Yet, like the global sanitation goals, the RDP offered no detailed policy or plan for achieving that goal.It only proposed 'establishing a national water and sanitation programme' (ibid.).Moreover, because the South African Constitution specifies that water and sanitation provision is a local (municipal) government matter (Taing 2015, 66), national government has effectively left implementation to municipalities whilst providing only broad guidelines.Furthermore, the RDP policymakers did not consider sanitation provision requirements for urban informal settlements.That was because they imagined being able to provide sufficient formal urban housing to eradicate need for informal settlements.Indeed, their main water and sanitation focus was on rural areas.
The then newly established Department of Water and Forestry (DWAF)'s Water Supply and Sanitation Policy White Paper (DWAF 1994) indicated an intention to provide adequate sanitation in the form of a 'well-constructed' ventilated improved pit (VIP) latrine 'per household'; and -for urban area residents -'ensuring that all households were provided basic services "within a reasonable time frame"' (Taing 2015, 64). 2 While 1996 saw DWAF publish a National Sanitation Policy White Paper seeking to require households to bear the main responsibility for their sanitation provision, that was never an approved national policy principle.The first legislation to define basic sanitation was the Water Services Act (108 of 1997).It prescribed that the minimum is services 'necessary for the safe, hygienic and adequate collection, removal, disposal or purification of human excreta, domestic waste-water and sewage from households, including informal households' (Article I.1.ii;see Taing 2015, 68).But it also limited all levels of government's obligation in terms of 'the nature, topography, zoning and situation of the land in question' (Article III.11.2.f.).Interestingly, it did not restate the 1994 RDP's specification -one that people continue to clamour to see realised -of a toilet per household.
2001 saw reiteration of the 1997 policy but, because of a concern to address indigency (DHS 2012, 7-8), it contradicted the 1996 proposal that households should bear responsibility for sanitation by adding that municipalities had to provide free basic services, including basic sanitation, to users unable to afford higher sanitation services levels.Importantly as regards people's experiences using sanitation services, DWAF's (2001) White Paper on Basic Household Sanitation explicitly recognised that 'toilets are just one element in a range of factors that make up good sanitation'.Other factors that it recognised included '[c]ommunity participation in decision-making . . .safer living environments, greater knowledge of sanitation-related health practices and improved hygiene'.And it specified that sanitation 'refers to the principles and practices relating to the collection, removal or disposal of human excreta, household waste water and refuse as they impact upon people and the environment' (DWAF 2001, 5;italics added).Yet these features of the White Paper appear subsequently to have been forgotten or ignored. 3Moreover, despite public-access toilets in informal settlements often being blocked by refuse disposed into them (see below), DWAF's ( 2003) Strategic Framework for Water Services excluded reference to refuse (Pan 2016, 2-33).
One of DWAF's (2001:5) White Paper's stated purposes was to address a need for provision of what it described as a 'basic level of household sanitation to mainly rural areas and [urban] informal settlements'.It then defined'[t]he minimum acceptable basic level of sanitation . . .[a]s (a) appropriate health and hygiene awareness and behaviour; (b) a system for disposing of human excreta, household waste water and refuse, which is acceptable and affordable to the users, safe, hygienic and easily accessible . ..; and [rehearsing an RDP goal] (c) a toilet facility for each household' (DWAF 2001, 5-6 italics added; also see Taing 2015, 82).However, it did not provide any criteria for assessing appropriateness.Nor did it explain how to assess or to ensure acceptability, affordability, safety or ease of accessibility of sanitation facilities or services.Consequently, practically all efforts to achieve the goal have been focused, as previously, on technology provision that was then assessed almost entirely by numbers of provided toilets.As Eales (2011b, 35) points out, 'most municipalities have opted for a technocratic top-down approach to delivery, with decisions implemented with little public involvement'.
That tendency towards a focus on technology was exacerbated when DWAF's (2003:ii) Strategic Framework introduced the notion of a water ladder (see Taing 2015, 86; Pan 2016:xvi) 4  into its existing National Sanitation Programme -one which aimed to eradicate the country's whole sanitation backlog (i.e.provide sufficient toilet facilities) by 2010.Although phrased in progressivist terms, the services-ladder notion permitted provision of less sophisticated and less user acceptable water-and sanitation-service technologies than had been envisaged by the 2001 White Paper and the 1994 RDP.The notion was introduced when DWAF recognised the likely long-term presence of urban informal settlements, including those on invaded land and/or in areas, including private land not zoned for dense residential occupation and where expenditure of public funds on infrastructure is precluded.As part of its Strategic Framework for Water Services, it enabled DWAF to oblige municipalities to recognise that, for such settlements, '[i]nterim basic water and sanitation services should be provided as appropriate, affordable, and practical in accordance with a progressive plan that addresses both land tenure and basic services [and that] DWAF will provide best-practice guidelines to assist water services authorities' (DWAF 2003, 43 original underscore; added italics; see also Taing 2015, 86;Pan 2016, 2-5).DWAF (2003:67) defined an interim sanitation service merely as: 'A temporary sanitation service [that] is an interim measure and should provide privacy to the user, be readily accessible and in close walking distance, and provide for the safe disposal of human waste'.Moreover, DWAF's 2005 National Sanitation Strategy which aimed to accelerate sanitation provision stated that "the emphasis is on those aspects of sanitation . . .related directly to human habitation, activity and behaviour . . .not includ[ing a] . . .broader definition of sanitation . . .[It] is biased mainly towards the management of human excreta . . ." (DWAF 2004, 6).
A technology bias -with its implication that assessing sanitation provision is sufficient if done by establishing ratios of installed toilets to a settlement's population -reappeared in DWAF's ( 2009) Free Basic Sanitation Implementation Strategy which catalogued various technical sanitation options.While it also linked each option to particular types of settlement and, at least ideally, to their acceptability to and affordability for their intended users, and while its executive summary stated that user households should be consulted about technology choices, its thrust remained technical.Failing to specify how local authorities should establish user opinions about the various options or how they should incorporate those into planning processes, it effectively left the decisions to municipalities and their officials.It also reset the target for clearing the country's sanitation-provision backlog to 2014, ostensibly to bring it into line with a (subsequently unrealised) national target 'that all . . .should have access to a house by 2014' (DWAF 2009: §2.2).
Thus did DWAF once again reduce sanitation to little more than technology provision in local authorities' hands.Its rhetorical statements notwithstanding, it enabled those responsible for providing services to ignore the socio-cultural factors identified just two years previously such as safety, affordability and user acceptability.It also reinforced municipalities' ability to decide how quickly and in terms of what technology they would meet their service-provision obligations and to do that in light of their own respective capacity constraints, their resource availability and each informal settlement's particular characteristics.
The above shows that, as is the case globally for the sanitation MDGs, DWAF's 2001 goal to eradicate South Africa's sanitation backlog by 2010 was not met (DHS 2012, 9).Moreover, the same applied to DWAF's (2009)  These figures indicate that, in 2011, almost 40% of the country's households still lacked sustainable access even to basic sanitation (also see Pan 2016, 1-2; DWS 2016, 15). 5   Since then, as indicated by Table 2 below and as explicated in the National Sanitation Policy 2016 (DWS 2016), the broad policy goals have remained unchanged.That is despite the national sanitation mandate having shifted, in 2019, to a merged Department of Human Settlements, Water and Sanitation -a shift that has had no significant effect on how municipalities, as the responsible level of government for water and sanitation, have attempted to implement pol-icy.That includes how they interpret what is meant by provision of a basic level of household sanitation and how precisely to apply it in practice -including, in particular, how to achieve the goal of an acceptable, affordable, safe and accessible sanitation service.

Cape Town sanitation policy
Since the ethnographic data presented below are from research conducted in settlements within the area of jurisdiction of the City of Cape Town (CoCT), a brief outline of CoCT sanitation policy is apposite.
For some years, CoCT's Water and Sanitation Informal Settlements Unit (WSISU) has interpreted the national basic sanitation policy -as it applied to urban informal settlementsas requiring provision of at least one (shared) toilet per five informal settlement households.Based on this standard, CoCT asserted that, by 2011, 92% of all the city's households had access to basic (or better) sanitation, although, as Pan (2016:4-42) points out, those numbers fail to account for the SAHRC (2014)'s exclusion of chemical/container toilets and portapotties as acceptable for basic sanitation -an exclusion that followed from DWAF's National Sanitation Strategy's buckets Notwithstanding the SAHRC's ruling regarding porta-potties, civil society pressure for one on-site sewered flush toilet per household led the city to provide one (three times weekly serviced) porta-potty per household in some areas: CoCT officials said, it is, after all, a flush system so not quite like a container or chemical toilet.
The porta-potties were provided ostensibly for use at night when accessing a public-access full-flush facility on a settlement's edge is dangerous, especially in crime-ridden areas where gender-based violence is endemic or, in instances where such a facility is locked overnight, impossible.

Sanitation provision and sanitation practices in selected informal settlement areas
Before presenting the ethnographic data used here to illustrate the diversity of sanitation practices and experiences of people in informal settlements, a brief diversion is needed to describe the methods used to gather those data.

Ethnographic research methods
As indicated below, the data presented derive from research conducted in two of Cape Town's areas with informal settlements.The researchers involved spent many months engaged, on a face-to-face basis and at various times of the day, with a variety of residents of those areas as well as with various sanitation-services personnel working there.Their engagements involved a range of research techniques.Those included spending long periods with residents, both individually and in focus groups, discussing as well as observing and recording details about residents' sanitation practices and experiences, especially but not only around the settlements' public toilet facilities.Such observation was particularly productive in the early mornings when people emerged from their shack homes.
It also generated data at other times during the day.
For the most part, sampling in such a process was opportunistic, but it also involved snowball sampling with residents participating in the research introducing the researchers to others in their social networks.Small social surveys that included extended open-ended questions were also conducted in both areas, with snowball sampling being used to select interviewees.Data gathered through these relatively informal techniques, and all of which was recorded by the researchers whilst in the field, have been drawn upon in this paper to illustrate people's sanitation practices and experiences.They are also presented to show how narrating such experiences reveals the limitations of assessment of sanitation-service provision through simple counting of installed toilets of various kinds.Put differently, the data are presented to address the article's main question which is: what does an ethnographic focus on people's actual sanitation practices and behaviours tell us about the usefulness of numbers-based assessments of toilet provision and of success in achieving goals that are acceptable to users?
The article offers an answer through considering first the Wetlands informal settlement in Masiphumelele in the southern Cape Peninsula.It then turns to three informal settlements in Khayelitsha, Cape Town's largest Black African residential area.While the data presented all come from research undertaken almost a decade ago, conditions in Cape Town's informal settlements have changed little since -partly because of growth in and of informal settlements and partly because of financial constraints on the local authorities some of which have been exacerbated by financial corruption.The Covid 19 pandemic has further constrained possibilities for improvement.Moreover, the data presented below continue to illustrate clearly the limitations of depending simply on numbers of installed water-borne toilets to assess success in meeting sanitation service provision goals and targets.

Sanitation practices in masiphumelele wetlands
In 2013, Matthew Schroeder conducted ethnographic research in the Masiphumele Wetlands settlement.Over 10,000 people were then living there in some 2,290 shack homes alongside a natural wetland (Schroeder 2016).Masiphumelele's formal low-cost housing area lay alongside the Wetlands settlement.It had an estimated 29,000 residents.13,000 of them lived in formal houses and 16,000 in backyard shacks on the formal house sites.Each formal house had a sewered full-flush toilet.A nearby small Temporary Relocation Area (TRA) accommodated approximately 1,000 residents relocated from the Wetlands area and awaiting formal housing.The CoCT had provided 58 cubicles, each with a flush toilet, in the TRA (one toilet per 3.5 households and per 17 residents).Despite CoCT's stated goal of providing one shared toilet per five informal settlement households -a principle many Cape Town informal settlement residents rejected (SAHRC 2010, 2 n.6) -there were only 132 CoCT-provided flush toilets in the Wetlands settlement (excluding the TRC).This constitutes a crude average of one toilet per 17 households (one per about 76 residents).Most of those 132 toilets were in rows on the settlement's edge where sewers had been laid and municipal vehicles could access them.However, this positioning limited residents' access to them, especially those living far from the settlement's edge and for whom a long walk was problematic and dangerous for women and children, particularly at night when gangsters were about.
Significantly, the research revealed, all but 22 of those 132 CoCT-provided toilets had been commandeered some years earlier by individual households or, more commonly, by small groups of households.Each was then kept locked, thus limiting access only to members of the particular toilet-key group households and those able to borrow a key.Moreover, the intense pressure on the remaining unlocked 22 toilets resulted in their commonly being filthy, broken and/or blocked and thus unusable.
The importance of recognising this practice of commandeering and locking toilets is that it reveals the absurdity of assessing toilet-provision success on a ratio of numbers toilets per household in a settlement.It also begs two questions: Firstly, on what local-level social relationships was the practice based?Secondly, how did those who were effectively locked out manage their sanitation practices?Since the first question is not directly relevant to this article's concerns (but see Schroeder 2015), only the second is substantively addressed.
People had commandeered and effectively privatised CoCTprovided flush toilets soon after they had been installed and after an initial, but quickly failed, CoCT attempt to organise a settlement-wide volunteer-based toilet-cleaning system (including residents paying a monthly fee to a residents' committee, ostensibly to manage the system).Once that had failed, and because CoCT explicitly expected residents to clean and maintain the toilets, groups of residents commandeered particular toilets and locked them for their households' exclusive use.In some cases, residents reported, their small toilet-key groups remained exclusive; in other cases a group's size and membership fluctuated, with growth (and shrinkage) occurring when kin or close friends settled in (or left) the Wetlands and/or when interpersonal relationships strengthened sufficiently to incorporate a new household as a group member (or weakened so that a group member was expelled).The various toiletcleaning arrangements people made all demonstrated a form of sociality necessary when toilets are shared, a sociality that local authority personnel do not imagine as necessary, and therefore do not encourage, when they expect large numbers of residents to share what are effectively public-access toilets.
The toilet-key group arrangement did mean that each of the 110 locked toilets was maintained and kept relatively clean by its own toilet-key group's members.However, it also had a perverse consequence -that many settlement residents were unable easily, if at all, to use these CoCT-provided toilets.That then increased pressure on the few un-commandeered toilets.Data from a small snowball sample indicate between three and eight households in each toilet-key group and an average of 5.13 households (21.5 individuals) using each locked toilet.Extrapolating those figures to the whole population suggests that only about 564 of the 2,290 Wetlands households and 2,365 individuals of the approximately 10,000 residents (respectively, 25% and 24%) had relatively easy access to a locked toilet.
There was another consequence of the toilet-key group system where residents had themselves taken on everyday toilet maintenance and cleaning of their respective commandeered toilets.In late 2011, when CoCT introduced a janitorial service to maintain CoCT-provided toilets, the janitors could not access many of the locked toilets since the toilet-key holders refused to hand over their keys.They said they preferred to manage their own group's toilet for themselves and to exclude outsiders from their sanitation-management networks.However, other toilet-key groups used various ties of sociality with neighbours to enable the janitors to enter and clean their commandeered toilets.Along with relationships between people holding keys to the same toilet, those ties represent a facet of their sanitation-management practices.In other words, and illustrating an important component of this article and an argument imbedded in DWAF's (2001:5) White Paper about 'community participation', sanitation management on the ground involves a variety of social-relational arrangements that are integrally related to other social relationships between settlement residents, all of which need support -especially where toilet sharing is expected by the authorities.
How did the three-quarters of Wetlands informal settlement's residents who were 'locked out' manage their sanitation needs?The following describes their sanitation practices in order, later, to consider what knowledge about those practices reveals about the dangers of number crunching for assessing extent to which toilet provision has been successful.In this instance that is despite the CoCT having provided way fewer toilets than to meet its one toilet per five households goal.In addition, knowledge about people's sanitation practices suggests means for developing other assessment criteria regarding success in sanitation provision.
Interviews with a small sample of non-key group members indicated that many had tried, either through friendship relationships or simply by appealing to goodwill, to borrow locked toilet keys.They explained that they preferred doing that to having to try to use the few unlocked Wetlands toilets which were commonly filthy, often blocked and where one almost always had to wait in a long queue (see Muanda, Goldin, and Haldenwang 2020).Some toilet-key holders were reportedly willing to permit some neighbours and friends occasionally to use their commandeered toilets.But it was evident that, for both those who asked to borrow a key and for those who then lent it, it was always an uncomfortable process if not a threat to their respective senses of dignity, and a source of conflict.Indeed, arguments sometimes arose, especially over weekends when many were drunk, around rights and for whose benefit the toilets had been installed.
Many non-key holders reported going to the neighbouring TRA to use a public-access toilet there (all 58 were unlocked, relatively well maintained by janitors and there were more there than the one per five households required).Others said they went to the neighbouring formal settlement and asked there to 'borrow' a toilet.Saliently, some reported 'holding' until they reached their workplaces or a shopping mall en route to work.And a few said they limited their night-time food and drink intake in order to be able to 'hold' until they could make it to such a toilet in the morning.In addition, some, especially women, reported using buckets or portapotties kept in their homes; and research observations of people emptying those receptacles suggested this practice to be more prevalent than was reported in interviews.Since CoCT had not provided porta-potties to Wetlands residents, there was no emptying and cleaning service.Those who used them or buckets emptied those into the nearby wetland or into the makeshift canals between their shacks and that drained into the wetland.People used buckets for night time and rainy winter-day use -for reasons of personal safety, both en route to and at the public toilets themselves, and because of the distances to be traversed in the dark or wet.Moreover, being alongside a wetland, paths between the shacks were often flooded during winter.Others reported practising open defecation, commonly in the wetland bushes whilst small children were observed defecating in the open wherever the urge seemed to take them.Women then scooped up and deposited the faeces in the canals.

Sanitation practices in three Khayelitsha informal settlements
Similar ethnographic data derive from three settlements in Khayelitsha where Kwame Norvixoxo conducted extensive fieldwork during 2013 and 2014.Khayelitsha is a lateapartheid constructed Black urban-area township.Its present population is about a million residents.Apart from various informal settlements, it includes middle income and lower income formal housing areas as well as areas where residents have incrementally built masonry houses on previously provided serviced sites where they began living in shacks in the mid-late 1990s.From the start, those sites were in formally planned areas with roads, sewers and other infrastructural connections; and they included a CoCT-provided sewered fullflush toilet in a free-standing cubicle with a standpipe attached.Many residents there retain shack extensions to their masonry homes, to accommodate additional family members or rentpaying backyard tenants.
The three contiguous informal settlements from which ethnographic data presented here derive are BM Section -a name derived from Barney Molokwane Corner (Taing 2015, 160) -France and Silvertown.In aggregate, the three settlements' population numbered around 26,000 residents in about 4,620 households.A total of 694 CoCT-provided full-flush toilets meant that there was a ratio of 6.7 households per such toilet.Taking account of an additional 98 chemical and 142 container toilets, also CoCT-provided, that ratio falls to 4.95 CoCTprovided toilets per household -but note the SAHRC's explicit exclusion of chemical/container toilets as acceptable for basic sanitation provision (see above).
Somewhat unusual in settlements in CoCT's jurisdictional area, there was a CoCT-provided palisade-surrounded public ablution facility in both BM Section and Silvertown.Those included gender segregated toilets and shower cubicles (which in BM Section were not in use during the time of research -the janitors used the men's shower cubicles for storage), as well as a clothes washing area and handwash basins.Both were maintained by CoCT-paid janitors while CoCT-paid security personnel controlled access to them.Significantly, the location of BM Section's public ablution facility alongside a main local vehicular and pedestrian traffic artery, meant it had become a sanitation resource for passers-by.Consequently, relatively few BM Section residents used it, clearly indicating the fallacy in technocraticcum-bureaucratic attempts to include the ablution facility toilets in a count of toilets provided for BM Section residents.
As in Masiphumelele's Wetlands, CoCT had provided BM Section, France and Silvertown with rows of public-access flush toilets alongside each settlement's edge.In addition, in BM Section there were a few sets of two to four toilets situated between 10 and 50 m from the rows of toilets.At the time of research, these intra-settlement toilets were relatively new, having been put in place after a devastating fire that destroyed many shacks but also left space for sewers to be laid.This occurred despite CoCT having previously been hesitant, for technical reasons, to lay sewers in the settlement.
CoCT-paid janitors maintained the CoCT-provided facilities.They also maintained and managed the public ablution facilities.In addition, residents in all three used a range of other kinds of faecal-waste receptacles -including all those listed at the start of this paper.
Again as in Masiphumelele, the practice of residents commandeering and locking toilets for exclusive use had been occurring for some years.One BM Section resident explained that she had commandeered and locked a toilet for her own family's and a few friends' use immediately when it had been installed.This was despite CoCT intending that it be shared between five households as per the previously mentioned CoCT principle.She reported simply having given the installation personnel the names of some other (in her case fictitious) householders with whom she claimed she would share the toilet.As observed in France settlement, one result of households commandeering a toilet near their home was that they then also fenced it, thereby marking their ownership claim.And in some cases research revealed only one person or household using a locked CoCT-provided flush toilet whilst only occasionally granting access to friends or family members.
By acting thus, residents effectively asserted partial ownership of a particular sanitation facility -partial because they expected CoCT to ensure the toilets' technical functionality and because most of the full flush toilets' doors carried signage stating 'Property of the City of Cape Town'.Notably, this signage contradicted what the then WSISU head said when he explained that CoCT regarded ownership as shared.He said that CoCT provides toilets to informal settlements for residents' use whilst they had to manage and maintain them on a daily basis.In other words, WSISU's then head imagined an implicit social contract between residents and CoCT.Yet, from most residents' perspective, CoCT owned and were thus responsible for the toilets.As some 30 BM Section residents insisted, as if with one voice during a group discussion, toilet maintenance was exclusively CoCT's responsibility and residents could not be expected to carry that responsibility for a supposedly shared (but actually public-access) facility.
Residents' commandeering (and sometimes fencing off) toilets of course changed that somewhat.Moreover, the practice also had benefits for those who had commandeered a toilet: they could control its use and limit how many people used it.In addition to ensuring cleanliness, it enabled them to control the anal cleansing materials used -an important issue, as research showed.Many residents were well aware that using magazine or newspaper pages, leaves, cloth, corn cobs etc. for anal cleansing materials, and dropping it into the toilet, can block toilets and render them unusable until, and then only after a struggle on residents' part to summon them, CoCT technicians eventually arrive to clear the sewer.Residents understood that use of inappropriate materials is most easily avoided by controlling access to a particular facility.
The janitors and security personnel at BM Section's public ablution facility were particularly concerned about use of inappropriate anal cleansing materials, as were CoCT officials who frequently complained about it (Taing 2015, 142).But they failed to grasp the extent to which it resulted from residents' poverty, along with CoCT's failure to provide sufficient toilet tissue.The problem was exacerbated by an inadequate solid waste collection system so that some residents discarded various items of refuse, inappropriate for a sewered system, into the toilets (also see Taing 2015, 5-7;Pan 2016, 4-48).Through being able to control access to the public ablution facility, and to monitor it closely, personnel there were on constant alert to preclude use of 'foreign' anal-cleansing materials or people discarding inappropriate matter into the toilets.But doing that was impossible in the long lines of settlement-edge CoCT-provided public-access full-flush toilets where janitors moved along the lines in order sequentially to clean them but were unable to keep a consistent watch over any.
Again as in Masiphumelele, various BM Section, France and Silvertown residents avoided the often blocked public-access flush toilets provided by CoCT in favour of open defecation.An example is a man who had resided in Khayelitsha for fourteen years.He had previously lived with family in an older Cape Town township with formal housing.When interviewed, he had only recently moved to BM Section.He explained that, when he had first settled in a Khayelitsha informal settlement, there had been very few flush toilets and virtually no alternatives other than open buckets in people's homes.Preferring not to use a bucket and wanting to avoid queuing for the few unblocked settlement-edge flush toilets whilst severely pressed, he had walked from his shack towards a nearby highway's verge each early morning and, once there, had simply squatted to defecate in the bushes about three to six metres from the passing cars.As he and other residents explained, open defecation was preferable to defecating in a dark, dingy and smelly cubicle because, in the open, one had fresh air and could smell vegetation rather than the odour of other people's excreta.He added that he had later obtained a bucket and used that, when absolutely necessary, as a receptacle for his nighttime defecation within the confines of his one-room shackhome; but he still preferred open defecation.Moreover, he said, he felt intense discomfort and shame going to empty the bucket and having others see him carrying his own faeces.A consequence of that sense of shame and threat to personal dignity, one that became clear from further ethnographic research, was that some women preferred to use small five litre plastic buckets that are not so obvious when one goes to empty them -even though using those small (±240 mm diameter) malleable plastic containers as faecal-waste receptacles is itself extremely inconvenient.
Various men and women expressed concern about being seen carrying human faeces.As a locally resident research assistant explained, this might have been related to what he said are Xhosa people's belief that touching or even carrying another person's or one's own faeces in a container brings bad luck and other people's disparagement if one is observed doing so.
A similar cultural constraint motivated various BM Section residents' expressions of disgust regarding use of a porta-potty in that, by being a kind of semi-sanitised inhouse bucket toilet, it attracted the same kind of revulsion and abhorrence as did regular plastic buckets that many people were forced by circumstance to use.That CoCT should have seen fit to provide such receptacles, even with the provision of a thrice-weekly cleansing service, was -as discussed below -seen as an insult to people's aspirations for proper living as fully recognised urban citizens.As one woman said when asked why she resisted using the portable flush toilet that CoCT had given her and that she had in her home: The porta-potty was fine for her four-year-old daughter, but not something she could 'reduce herself to'.For her to use it would undermine her dignity.
A further expressed problem with using a CoCT-provided porta-potty was that it offered no privacy and was much the same as using one's own emergency overnight bucket.While some residents had built small improvised wooden cubicles next to their shacks to accommodate their porta-potties, their having to do that resonated for some with memories of a 2010 media-driven outrage when CoCT had installed unenclosed flush toilets on new serviced residential sites in Khayelitsha's Makhaza area, ostensibly after having obtained agreement from community leaders that the sites' owners were willing to enclose them for themselves (Penner 2010;Templehoff 2012).At least in part, it was resonance with that widely publicised incident that led to what have been described as the city's pooprotests (see below).
Resistance to using a porta-potty in one's home arises from, among other reasons, a sense of a need for privacy when defecating, particularly if one is sharing the room with other household members.As the woman mentioned above who resisted using a porta-potty asked: 'surely you don't want other people smelling your faeces or hearing you fart?' For her the more convenient, private and dignified option was to walk the 20 to 25 metres from her home to use a toilet in the unlocked rows of toilets along the settlement's periphery.Yet, that too was unsatisfactory.Despite CoCT's stated intention of at least one toilet per five households and a janitorial service, the fact that the toilets she used were open to anyone meant they were often filthy and sometimes blocked.That was despite janitors servicing them.Since the janitors had to spend their days roaming between and cleaning the toilets, they could not control access to the toilets or how they were used, as occurred in the two palisaded public ablution facilities.Moreover, a smelly open drain passed right in front of the closest set of public-access flush toilets, and some of the drain's contents often spilled into the toilet cubicles.In addition, the cubicles there were littered with used and thus filthy newspapers and other garbage, their cistern lids were missing and their pedestals filthy.While some might, under such circumstances, have chosen to use the apparently much cleaner porta-potty than the public-access toilet cubicle, people's sense of disgust, and their concern for privacy, about odour and for dignity, led them to use the filthy public-access flush toilet rather than the porta potties at their homes.
Among various other concerns residents raised regarding their everyday sanitation practices was the particularly challenging issue of personal safety and threats of danger -especially since there were many reports of (primarily) women being attacked en route to the flush toilets (mainly but not only at night) and also of attacks -including rapes and murders -that were perpetrated while women were inside a toilet cubicle.Templehoff (2012) cites media reports of toilet users being shot through cubicle walls (also see Muanda 2020:243).
Another concern people raised and that again exposes a general incongruency between officials' ideas about adequacy of provision and users' ideas about functionality (Muanda, Goldin and Haldenwang 2020, 239) is the issue of foul odours.The CoCT-provided facilities tended not to have been designed to eliminate foul odours, at least not sufficiently for users to feel comfortable using them.In demonstrating the dysfunctionality of those facilities from a users' perspective, this again illustrates the fallacy of technocrats' assumptions that adequacy means simply having sufficient toilets in place to meet a preconceived ratio.

Poo protests, dignity and urban citizenship
A salient concern arising from ethnographic observations revealed that many residents aspired to having (and thus being provided with) the best possible facilities and services, facilities and services that they regard as commensurate with their aspirations for a sense of self-worth as dignified and valuable human beings and their being recognised as fully fledged South African urban citizens (Nyamnjoh 2016, 72).Yet the conditions they found themselves having to live under undercut their ability to achieve those aspirations.
For some, what came to be known as Cape Town's pooprotests -where the contents of porta-potty receptacles were spread over the international airport concourse and outside the provincial administration's buildings in the city centre (and subsequently over a Cecil Rhodes statue on the University of Cape Town campus) -represents their explicit linking of the inadequacy of sanitation facilities and services in their areas of residence to their demands for recognition as full urban citizens.On one hand, it represented an element of an insurgent citizenship that has marked various facets of the South African urban landscape in recent years.On the other, it constituted an explicit statement about the extreme dichotomy between the conditions in which South Africa's comfortably affluent population lives and works and the impoverished foul-stinking circumstances of the country's massive marginalised citizenry (Eales 2011b, 35).As Penner (2011) says about post-apartheid South Africa's sanitation politics: 'toilets have become potent symbols of human dignity and equal rights'.And, Penner adds, 'the issue is not only whether or not sanitation is provided; the debate also hinges on the standard of that provision . . .[which then begs questions such as] . . .When is provision good enough, dignified enough?And who decides?' In this context, the often wide disparity between media reports of CoCT officials' comments regarding the extent of sanitation provision and what actually transpires on the ground continues to provide further impetus for such sociopolitical tensions.Moreover, it has simply reinforced the socio-political significance of sanitation provision that no exercise in top-down assessment through number crunching can conceptualise.Such exercises cannot be used to substantiate that what has been provided is adequate.Indeed, socio-political tensions have been exacerbated by CoCT claims to have provided close to 100% sanitation access on the basis of a one toilet per five households assertion, and that the number of toilets provided and the number of people in informal settlements meets that ratio.They are also exacerbated when people's experience shows that poor policy design and implementation fails to deliver on DWAF's (2001:5) intention to provide sanitation "that is "'acceptable and affordable to the users, safe, hygienic and easily accessible'.
That said, CoCT is not alone in having failed to meet that national policy goal.As indicated in the brief summary above, national policy is confused and at times irrational.Moreover, similar examples to those presented above could be drawn from many (if not all) South Africa's cities and towns.For example, the 2010 brouhaha around unenclosed toilets in Khayelitsha's Makhaza area was repeated in 2011 around unenclosed toilets in the Rammulotsi informal settlement in the small town of Viljoenskroon in Free State Province.A similar situation reportedly pertained, during the previous decade, elsewhere in the country (Evans 2011;IOL 2011;Templehoff 2012) with reports indicating it was widespread and occurring in many small South African towns.Nonetheless, a few smaller towns have been somewhat more successful (for example, see Vice 2015) albeit in the face of continually growing numbers of informal settlements and of residents in them.This article's focus on informal settlements within CoCT's jurisdiction is simply because that is where the authors' research was concentrated.

Conclusion
This article highlights firstly that sanitation behaviour (sometimes described as sanitation management) is socio-culturally multiplex and that it involves a wide range of human relationships with technology and the environment, as well as a wide range of interpersonal social relationships, all of which are connected with the disposal of human waste and the management of whatever is used for that disposal.
Secondly, it highlights that government-agency provision of sanitation facilities and services can produce a range of unanticipated social and cultural outcomes, at least some of which undermine the possibility of achieving the original intentions behind planning, designing for and implementing such provision.The article also indicates that sanitationservice and -facility provision sometimes spawns political initiatives -e.g.poo protests -that, in the medium to long term, hinder realisation of the intended outcomes of providing those facilities.In other words, the result can be counterproductive for all concerned when socio-politically inappropriate technologies or socio-culturally dysfunctional facilities and services are provided, and when that then leads to uprisings and the beginnings of social movements that reveal people's search for full recognition as urban citizens.
Thirdly the article highlights that, even while CoCT, at least during the period of research on which this article is based (but also since then), has kept designing, implementing and testing various sanitation technologies for informal settlements, evidence from ethnographic research suggests that, for residents, access to sanitation means that it has to be able to meet certain on-the-ground socio-culturally functional expectations.That applies no matter what standard of infrastructure is providedand often, because it is paid for by state resources, it is of a far lower standard than what residents actually want (Twersky, Buchanan, and Threfall 2013, 41).The point is that such infrastructure has to meet DWAF's (2001: 5-6) policy goal of providing sanitation that is 'acceptable and affordable to the users, safe, hygienic and easily accessible'.As indicated, those expectations, at least in the short term, include sanitation facilities that are able to prevent (or very significantly minimize) foul odours, that ensure privacy, dignity and especially personal safety for users (both whilst traversing distances between shack homes and toilets and whilst using them) and that provide a sense of proper hygiene in and around them.The expectations also include ensuring that there is adequate lighting in public ('communal') toilet facilities, that there is a constantly maintained high level of cleanliness and technical functionality and crucially that, whatever type of sanitation facility is provided, it is such that users regard it as dignified and not reflecting a standard they perceived as dehumanising or inferior.Struggles for urban citizenship include demands for properly functioning and dignified sanitation service provision.They also reflect resistance to processes through which 'ordinary people . . .become marginal to the process of municipal service planning and delivery' (Eales 2011b, 54).
How might the findings highlighted above translate into means for assessing success of sanitation provision and for achieving the standards required to meet the MDG and SDG sanitation targets, as well as DWAF (2001) policy goals ? Twersky et al (2013: 41) summarise what is missing from regular approaches when they say that 'The views and experiences of the people who benefit from [a program] . . .are often overlooked and underappreciated, even though they are an invaluable source of insight into a program's effectiveness'.What this means, and this applies in all countries with informal urban settlements, is that those tasked with introducing and maintaining sanitation services and facilities in informal settlements need innovatively to establish means to assess whether, in what ways and to what extent, sanitation-facility users' needs are or are not met, and to do that by taking full cognisance of how they themselves express those needs.That means having to listen to them, and to do so even as those needs and expectations inevitably change over time.Doing that in turn requires creating and using assessment criteria that discount, albeit without ignoring, the numbers of pieces of one-off installed technology.Listening to people and taking their experiential narratives seriously is crucial because any technology is useful only in relation to its socially and culturally accepted functions for those who use and experience using it.Assessment of such technology's substantive usefulness can be achieved only through considering whether it meets users' expressed needs.Put differently, it is crucial in policy design, implementation and management to mainstream concern with socio-cultural functions.Doing that can enable those responsible for providing a service to avoid being entrapped in a 'clash of rationalities' (Taing 2015) such as occurs when, on one hand, technological fixes and crude number crunching of their introduction are seen as solutions and when, on the other hand, users then resist or resent those technologies.Put differently, those responsible for implementing policy, especially in highly charged arenas where public health concerns are central, need to move beyond assuming that conventional consultation with supposed representatives of users will suffice for achieving compromise between stakeholders.Needed instead are processes that engage people on the ground in extensive and repeated participatory exercises that generate information about existing practices and, crucially, how those practices change over time -often in response to technological interventions -and thereby to be able to develop iterative processes for achieving policy goals.As Eales (2011b 35) has expressed it, what is needed is an 'inclusive mode of development . . .where priorities and projects are shaped through engagement and confrontative dialogue' with those for whom technology is designed and installed 'rather than by external delivery targets'.This is very different from the classic engineering and technocratic-cumbureaucratic goal of seeking a technical 'solution' when faced with a problem and assuming that the process of addressing the problem ends at that point.Being driven by processes of repeated social engagement with users is critically necessary for people's dignity to be prioritised over technical assessment criteria and thereby for ensuring the socio-cultural functionality of technology that is publicly funded.

Notes
1. UNESCO & WHO (2015:5)'s figure 4 indicates that 77% (68 + 9 percentage points) of the world's population had access, in 2015, to improved sanitation facilities (9 percentage points comprise those with access via shared improved facilities).Contradictorily, the same report (p.12) says that 'During the MDG period, it is estimated that use of improved sanitation facilities rose from 54% to 68% globally.The global MDG target of 77% has therefore been missed by nine percentage points.'The source of a 77% target is unclear; the MDG target was simply to halve the proportion of people without access to basic sanitation.Moreover, the figures presented in the various reports appear to be incommensurate with one another.2. Eales (2011b, 37-8) suggests that reasonable period was to be seven years.DWAF was established in 1994 as a ministry in the first postapartheid government.Its forestry responsibility was shifted to Agriculture in 2009.In 2014 its name changed to Department of Water Affairs and Sanitation.The Department was merged with the Department of Human Settlements (becoming the Department of Human Settlements, Water and Sanitation) in 2019.That merger ended in 2021 with Water and Sanitation once more becoming an autonomous department.3. DHS (2012) did echo those features but it proposed no on-theground change to give them effect.4. Pan (2016) refers to a sanitation ladder.5. WHO & UNICEF (2019:122) report that that figure was 24% in 2017.
Global sanitation-provision goals first appeared during a 1976 UN-organised Conference on Human Settlements.Another UN-organised Water Conference, in Argentina in 1977, linked the imperatives for sanitation provision to those for safe drinking water provision.It highlighted how the former was necessary to ensure the latter.The Mar del Plata Action Plan, produced at that 1977 conference, was endorsed by UN Resolution 32/158 of 1977 which resolved that 'providing safe drinking water and sanitation for all human settlements by 1990' needed 'a proper assessment . . . of water resources in all countries . . . in particular in developing countries' (UN 1977, 63).Similarly, the Declaration of Alma Ata (WHO (Europe) 1978), emanating from a 1978 International Conference on Primary Health Care in Kazhakstan

Table 1 .
Chronology of attempts to set and meet global sanitation goals: 1976-2020.
extended target to 2014(DWS 2016, 25).Nonetheless, the Department of Human Settlements (DHS) reported, in 2012, that the country had achieved the MDG of 'halving the proportion of population without sustainable access to basic sanitation' already in 2008(DHS 2012, 12; Eales 2011b, 33).However, following a South African Human Rights Commission mandate that a full investigation should occur, DHS also reported that about 3.2 million households . . .are at risk of service failure and/or are experiencing service delivery breakdowns [whilst] . . .1.4 million households . . . in formal settlements [in backyard shacks] . . .have no services and . . .584 378 households . . . in informal settlements mak[e] use of interim services . . .[creating] . . .a picture of service delivery failure on a massive scale (DHS 2012, 16).

Table 2 .
Chronology of attempts to establish South African sanitationpolicy & goals: 1994-2016.Commits to SDG6c eradication programme that banned their use other than in emergency situations and for no longer than a month.Figures provided by CoCT officials to one author of this article had it that, by 2014, close to 99% of households in the city's informal settlements had access to at least basic sanitation facilities.Yet that 99% included many chemical/container toilets and portapotties.Persistent civil society activism thus contests this kind of claim.That is both because of the SAHRC's position and because functionally, from informal settlement residents' experience, what CoCT regards as basic sanitation is utterly inadequate (see below).Moreover, the service provided fails to meet DWAF's (2001:5-6) acceptability, affordability, safety, hygiene and accessibility requirements.
Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) • Recognised: 'only one person in seven has access to adequate sanitation' • Aimed 'to provide clean water and sanitation to all' • Set goal to provide 'an adequate/safe sanitation facility per [residential] site' • Proposed: 'establishing a national water and sanitation programme' • Did not provide for any sanitation infrastructure for (unanticipated) urban informal settlements.1994Dept of Water and Forestry (DWAF) -White Paper: Water Supply and Sanitation Policy • Proposed: • one VIP per rural household • ensuring all urban households have basic services with a reasonable time frame (seven years) 1996 DWAF -White Paper: National Sanitation Policy • Recommended households bear main responsibility for sanitation provision (never approved as • Defined basic sanitation: services 'necessary for the safe, hygienic and adequate collection, removal, disposal or purification of human excreta, domestic waste-water and sewage from households, including informal households' 2001 DWAF -White Paper: Basic Household Sanitation• Proposed the minimum acceptable basic level of sanitation . . . is (a) appropriate health and hygiene awareness and behaviour; (b) a system for disposing of human excreta, household waste water and refuse, which is acceptable and affordable to the users, safe, hygienic and easily accessible ...; and (c) a toilet facility for each household"; and• Proposed providing free basic services, including basic sanitation, for users unable to afford higher services levels• Recognised that 'toilets are just one element in a range of factors that make up good sanitation' which included '[c]ommunity participation in decision-making ...•Reiterated earlier policy• Introduced focus on sustainability of sanitation services •